Does anyone remember a time when gum used to cost 25 cents? I do. You had your pick of Winterfresh, Big Red, Doublemint, and Juicy Fruit for just a quarter. Now there are more then just four choices to choose from, as you have an abundance of choices from Orbit, Stride, and Dentyne Ice. Along with more choices comes higher prices. While Juicy Fruit is still cheaper than the other brands (just 30 cents a pack), it is a forgotten brand. Teenagers know the Juicy Fruit brand but they choose not to buy it. To them Juicy Fruit lacks personality.

The best thing that Juicy Fruit could do is rebrand the product to increase consumers and sales. So what the company did was to find out what teenagers these days like to do. What they found out was that most teens spend their evenings going on "virtual dates" or hitting up a chat room. The common outdoor activity that they all shared was going to the beach.

Juicy Fruit put two and two together and created an online virtual beach party. They teamed up with the virtual environment HabboHotel.com and opened up the Juicy Fruit Beach Cafe in the hotel. Per month the site gets over 124,000 hits in Australia with a core age group of 13-18. The cafe is not only a place to have a beach party but it is also a way to interact with the brand and each other. Juicy Fruit reached out to its target market by taking out ads in Girlfriend, Xbox, and Playstation magazines. Another way they got teens to go the party was in every pack of Juicy Fruit they bought they had a code and they had to input it into the site to be entered in a competition. They won either Habbo credits or a Juicy Fruit umbrella.

I know an online beach party sounds really corny to us but that is probably because we are an older generation. This campaign was a virtual hit with teens. The contest entries exceeded 325,000 and set record the biggest online beach party!